My answer to Why India is ranked above Pakistan in Global Terrorism Index?
Answer by Vishu Menon:
You have quoted a Wikipedia site which quotes no authority. The site is, despite the best efforts of its promoters, is open to insertion, mutilation and unauthorized editing. Yet this site does not support your contention.
I have known several Pakistani friends, men and women, and I have known few like them in their love for peace, arts, science, fashion and free debates while they are abroad. There is obviously a different life – tortuously stifling for them – when they go home which is obvious when they start looking for their hateful Hijabs when they need to go home. . They are ashamed of the killings that take place on a weekly basis in mosques and public places; of the 157 human beings – most of them school children – shot in cold blood in a school. They are ashamed of the Malala Yusufzai shooting (though slightly envious of her rise to fame since then), of the stoning of women, of the shooting of a Federal Minister and a Governor for pointing out the stupidity of the Blasphemy law. They are also aware that Pervez Musharraf kept Osama Bin Laden hidden in the back lane of army barracks and actually sent Pakistani drones to supposedly ‘hunt down’ Osama in the hills bordering Afghanistan, killing civilians.
Terrorism arises from three basic factors : economic depravity, xenophobia, and religious intolerance. In this century, it is the last two factors – particularly religious intolerance – that have led to terrorism across the world. This latter has grown stronger and more vicious in the latter years – Conservatives in the secular United States, regardless of the very first amendment, have been spreading hatred to gather votes. However, hatred of other faiths looms large in the most dominant Muslim nations of the world – Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh. The Northern part of Nigeria, where Muslims are a majority, takes the top place in violence. Islamic State that displays the most explicit and repulsive form of violence (perhaps a little less repulsive than seating young women in pits and stoning her to death from above) quotes the Holy Quran for its actions.
While the average Pakistani realizes the importance of peaceful co-existence with other faiths, the Mullahs feel that such tolerance strikes at the very cause for the existence of Pakistan as a separate nation. A shia (of the Khoja Sect) founded Pakistan in the hope that a Muslim majority country would bring peace to Muslims and promised safety and security to people of other faith. Now most of the terrorism is targeted at the founder’s denomination of your peaceful religion! Your religious bigotry is so strong that Pakistan denied the very nationhood to the first and only Nobel Peace Prize winner for science and is in a denial mood for its one and only Peace prize winner! Kashmir (I am coming to it later) is an excuse; the incessant war with India (that is supposed to cause a thousand cuts on India) and the training of terrorists (who often bite the trainer) are signs of religious intolerance, which alone has become the hallmark of modern terrorism. The military big brass, though as unislamic as Jinnah himself (show me a Pakistani General who is not fond of Black Label whisky), stoke the fire of terrorism to safeguard their hallowed and rich territory of promotion and privileges through scare of war and terrorism.
The world knows that Pakistan has been the epicentre of terrorists, training terrorists from all over the world. According to an analysis published by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution in 2008, Pakistan was, “with the possible exception of Iran, perhaps the world’s most active sponsor of terrorist groups… aiding groups that pose a direct threat to the United States……Pakistan is probably today’s most active sponsor of terrorism” (Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism By Daniel Byman, ISBN 0-521-83973-4, 2005, Cambridge University Press,)
Nearly all of those who took part in the 9/11 episode had been to Pakistan once. CNN quoted US investigators that money for the operation – US$ 100,000 – was sent to Mohamed Atta, the suspected hijack ringleader of the September 11, 2001 attacks, by a man named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (Ahmed Umar Syed Sheikh), alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad, sourced from poverty-stricken Pakistan. In fact, you cannot name too many top terrorists in the world who had not been trained by Taliban in Pakistan who, in turn, had been trained by Inter-Services Intelligence who were not intelligent to realize that any Frankenstein you create would come home to deal with its creator sooner or later.
Global Terrorism Index is painstakingly researched and prepared by a team of dedicated people for the Institute For Economics and Peace located in Sydney, New York City and Mexico City. It says that it “works with a wide range of partners internationally and collaborates with intergovernmental organizations on measuring and communicating the economic value of peace”. They work in collaboration with the “National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism And the Responses to Terrorism. No doubt, data are harvested from National and Regional newspapers, news channels and other sources. I have not heard of anyone challenging the veracity of the reports published by GTI from time to time, nor of allegation of partiality against them. You will find in this map of the Eastern Hemisphere that India measures up with the countries of average violence while Pakistan stands out along with Iraq, Syria and Nigeria.
The 2015 Report of this august organization states:
Terrorism remains highly concentrated with most of the activity occurring in just five countries — Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. These countries accounted for 78 per cent of the lives lost in 2014. Although highly concentrated, terrorism is spreading to more countries, with the number of countries experiencing more than 500 deaths increasing from five to 11, a 120 per cent increase from the previous year. The six new countries with over 500 deaths are Somalia, Ukraine, Yemen, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Cameroon.
(Global Terrorism Index Report, Page 2).
A chart of most deaths due to terrorism during the past ten years show Pakistan at the very top of those affected.
You will see from the chart above that terrorism deaths in Pakistan in 2014 was pretty close to total terrorism-related deaths in the rest of the world – including the United States, were gun terrorism is rampant. Blacks live in terror of white policemen in that country, pleading on placards that their lives matter.
That’s not to say that there is or had been no terrorism in India. While seen against the chart above, the chart of terrorism- related death in India would be invisible, India has had its shameful incident of Gujarat violence that led to the death of 1044 citizens – 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus (These are government figures).. Thousands were injured. The 2008 attack by ten ISI-sponsored and L-e-T trained men on an unsuspecting Bombay led to the death of 169 innocent citizens – 31 of them foreigners. There have been other skirmishes, but the worst of them far less in number than the deaths due to gun violence in the United States that sit in judgment of other countries. Pakistan often kills in a week more men inside a place of worship than people die due to majority terrorism in several years. There have been occasional – one in several years – bombing of trains or public places in the past by Muslims, and a couple of them (including the Samjhauta Express bombing) allegedly by Hindus, but the disease of terrorism has not spread in India as it had in Pakistan.
In early 1990, virtually the entire Hindu population of Hindus were driven out of Kashmir State under threat of violent death, More than 300 died. There is no denying that since 2013, when it looked like a theocratic government under Mr. Modi of 2002 fame would win the elections, there had been talk of violence against the minorities. 62 deaths – 52 of them Muslims – took place in Muzzafar Nagar that year and several hundreds were rendered homeless. Laws that were aimed at restraining the way of life of minorities were newly passed or the existing laws were allowed to be enforced by violent mobs. A man in Northern India was killed for allegedly eating beef; a family was attacked in a railway carriage for carrying food that was suspected to contain beef. Lovers, even friends, of different faiths walking or traveling together are attacked by mobs, accusing the male member of trying to convert Hindu girls to Islam through ‘Love Jihad’. There have been a few instances of honour killing among Hindus as well as Muslims in India. In a tearing hurry to imitate Pakistan and Bangladesh, some Hindu extremists killed three rationalists, and have been regularly threatening intellectuals who speak out on the intolerance displayed by the new dispensation. For a Country that boasts of its secular credentials, these are matters of disgrace.
You would occasionally come across the ridiculous sight of a section of misguided Hindus, however small in number, in India worship Donald Trump for saying that Muslims will be banned (for some time) from entering the US. Trump is equated with (aptly, or perhaps by Freudian impulse) with Hanuman, the monkey-god.
While Kashmiris are a peaceful people when left alone, there have been attacks from across the border, indoctrinating and training of local Kashmiris to wage war against their own elected government, all of which has led to large military presence in Kashmir and some instances of violence and allegations of rape. This is also true of the North-West India were the soldiers are allowed to arrest and keep citizens without trial. The government resorts to violence against Adivasis ( indigenous people deprived of their land and livelihood due to encroachment by the so-called civilized men). They are summarily named as ‘Maoists’ (Communists who resort to violence) and arrested and jailed; even doctors and intellectuals who try to help them are persecuted. Courts, with the sword of transfers hanging over their heads, show no mercy to even invalids who are thus accused by the government. A small number of men and women who approach courts on behalf of persecuted minorities and helpless adivasis are arraigned on fake charges.
I will include all these atrocities among acts of terrorism and yet none of them comes anywhere close to the violent terrorism in Pakistan in particular; or in any Islamic Country with the exception the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and, to some extent, Malaysia. It so happens that these few countries are more keen on the economic well-being of their citizens than finding a violent way to send them all to heaven.
Moral? It doesn’t help to create evidences or to misinterpret those that exist. They don’t wash. Look up FAMOUS ASTRONAUTS AND GOOD FAITH
Why India is ranked above Pakistan in Global Terrorism Index?
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